Squidoo - How to Get More Free Traffic Hits to Your Squidoo Lens

Squidoo lenses thrive off of website traffic. Free traffic hits to your Squidoo lens are crucial to the success of the lens within Squidoo as far as lensranking and Squidoo Top 100 lists.

Squidoo lenses are an excellent opportunity for everyone, and anyone, to have their voice heard in this often overwhelming virtual world. The popularity of Squidoo has exploded and shows no signs of subsiding any time soon.

Knowing this, you jumped on board. You made an incredible Squidoo lens that you adore. You published your lens and made it "live" for the whole world to see! You have no doubt that masses of traffic will come rushing to see your work.

However, tumbleweeds are blowing through your lens. No traffic is coming to your Squidoo lens.

You built it, so why aren't they coming?

With a few simple tips, you can improve your free traffic to your Squidoo lens.

1. Free Traffic Hits - Tip #1

Online Forums

If you spend time online, you most likely spend, or have spent, time in online forums at one point or another. Don't forget to add your Squidoo lens address to your signature line! Traffic hits from online forums is free traffic! By simply doing what you do everyday, making posts and talking to friends, you are exposing your lens to many viewers. I get many traffic hits to my Squidoo lenses by people seeing my signature line in an online forum, and clicking through.

Two important rules to using online forums to generate more traffic to your lens.

a) Do NOT "spam" a forum. Don't go into a forum for the sole purpose of promoting your Squidoo lens. Contribute to the forum, answer questions, participate in discussions, but do NOT insult the forum community with blatant advertisement.

b) Always check the Terms of Service with a forum before adding your signature line. A sure way to NOT get attention in an online forum, is to start off by breaking the rules.

Be respectful. Be helpful.

2. Free Traffic Hits - Tip #2

Email Signature

This is a traffic generation technique that I see neglected so often. We all email. A simple signature line added to your email can go a long way. A very basic "Check Me Out On Squidoo" is sufficient. Again, be respectful, but also be proud of your work!

3. Free Traffic Hits - Tip #3

Learn to Make an Effective Lens

A Squidoo lens is treated the same as any other content on the internet. In fact, Squidoo may be treated "better" than many other sites simply due to the fact that Google "loves" Squidoo and crawls the site very, very often. It is very common for a new Squidoo lens to be indexed in days.

When Google "crawls" your lens, what do they want? Google wants the same high quality, keyword rich, theme dense, relevant content that it values in any other website. By creating proper and effective lenses, Google will show you "love", too. Learn how to create an effective lens. I cannot stress this enough.

4. Free Traffic Hits - Tip #4

Use Article Marketing and Squidoo together

Article Marketing and Squidoo go very well together. Free e-zine directories all over the internet allow you to submit articles that they publish for you - for free.

Let's say, for example, your lens is about hamsters. You can write an article about the eating habits of hamsters and show off some of your knowledge. Then submit this article to an article directory (or MANY article directories) and have your content showing off your knowledge published on the web.

Why would you do that? Simple, each article author is permitted to have a "bio box" at the end of their article. In this space, you can write a short blurb about you, your product, or your hobby, and then direct the reader to your lens. If the reader of your article is interested in the article itself and wants to know more, they will click through.

Marketing with articles can be a highly effective method to promote more free traffic hits to your Squidoo lens. It is fairly easy concept and worth learning.

5. Free Traffic Hits - Tip #5

Interact within the Squidoo Community

Squidoo is a social web site. We lensmasters love to check out the lenses on our fellow lensmasters, and the majority of us return "favors". Take the time to look at other lenses on Squidoo. Sign guest books, comment on the quality, give credit where credit is due. Join groups. Participate within the Squidoo community. If someone signs your guest book, go visit their lens. Again, be respectful and don't "spam" someones lens with unnecessary advertisement of YOUR lens.

These are just some basic, and often overlooked, tips to generate more free traffic to your Squidoo lens. Above all, please keep in mind the value to all of us with improved traffic site-wide. While we all want more free traffic hits to our own lens, more traffic to the Squidoo site as a whole is better for every lensmaster!